Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Thursday night kicks off another season of Buffalo Sabres hockey when the team gets set to host the Ottawa Senators at KeyBank Center for a 7 p.m. ET faceoff.
As the hockey team gets set to hopefully open the 2022-23 regular season on the right note, a number of local restaurants and breweries around the arena in Downtown Buffalo are also hoping to cash in on the start of another year for the Sabres.
"It's great when the Sabres get the season going, not just because we're big hockey fans, but because it really energizes the city," said Marc Honan from The Draft Room at the corner of Perry and Illinois Street. "You get so much more activity downtown, and I just think that's great for everybody. Obviously, we're right next to the arena, so that's a huge benefit for us, re-introduces people who maybe haven't been downtown for a while. They get to come in, try out all our new beers, check out our new menus, and we're excited."
"The summer and spring were a little bit under our expectations without any history year-over-year, so we know what to expect with the Sabres, and we're super excited," added Southern Tier Brewing Co. area operations manager Jim Austin. "We're ready for Thursday, we're ready for Saturday this week from staffing to product to everything that guests are going to be looking forward needing, that's for sure."
Last season for the Sabres saw attendance start out very low with the team coming off another disappointing campaign the year prior where Buffalo finished in last place. However, as the Sabres started to improve and team chemistry started to click - especially in the last 25-30 games played - attendance rebounded, which brought more people back in-and-around the arena.
"The end of last season, I think, was a good barometer for how we think this season will go. Fans are really excited about how the team finished," Honan said. "We saw spikes in attendance, and when there's more people at the arena, there's more people downtown, and there's more people for us in The Draft Room. So yeah, we think that the fans are excited about the upcoming season, and we're hopeful that the attendance will follow."
While it was tough for both businesses to say how much business increased as the team started to play better, certain promotional nights also helped bring totals up. This included RJ Night to celebrate Rick Jeanneret's banner raising ceremony, as well as the season finale, that was also Jeanneret's final game as the iconic play-by-play broadcaster of the Sabres.
However, both Honan and Austin are optimistic that with the team continuing to play better and hopefully turn the corner, the flow of people coming in-and-out on game nights will continue to trend upwards.
"We certainly would love to be busy," Austin said. "Obviously being located in conjunction to KeyBank [Center], we we see a ton of traffic from Sabres games to concerts to what have you, and we're happy to have the folks come in and enjoy our craft beer and our scratch kitchen food items.
"I could say that pretty confidently, as the team is doing better, there's definitely higher energy, more traffic, and certainly that equates to more revenue for us, as a brand."
With hockey season in Buffalo officially underway, as of Thursday night, what kind of preparations did businesses have to make ahead of the upcoming year? As it turns out, the biggest concern for both Southern Tier and The Draft Room was proper staffing.
"You want to make sure you have the right amount of staff both in your kitchen, in your servers, in your host, and everybody who makes the customer experience great," Honan said. "So we've been working hard to bulk up our staff and get ready for the season."
"We need to continually look for people in both front of the house and back of the house for our operations," Austin added. "We can certainly order food and we can get beer in house and everything else we need, but people are the biggest, probably, challenge that us and many others are faced with in the industry and other industries. So really staffing and getting people trained. Some of the new hires, obviously, haven't seen busy days, so there's going to be some learning curves in there, for sure."
This upcoming season is also set to be the first normal hockey season that the NHL and Buffalo has experienced since the start of the 2019-20 season before the COVID-19 pandemic. With the return to normalcy, what might both businesses be offering customers as they return to the arena?
For Southern Tier, it's about offering offering specialty beers specifically for Buffalo that you can't get anywhere else but Buffalo.
"For a beer fan or a craft beer fan, there's going to always be some liquid there or just one-off unique items that we purposely do to just have something different to talk about right, at the end of the day," Austin said. "As a craft beer fan, myself, when I go to a brewery, I just want to know what I can't get anywhere else, and we try to fulfill that, and we do. We have 5-6 lines always in operation that are just unique beers brewed specifically for Buffalo."
Meanwhile, The Draft Room offers people the opportunity of enjoying hockey games in Buffalo without actually being at the game.
"It's fans who want to watch the game. We'll get fans who don't necessarily have tickets to the game, but just want to be part of the excitement downtown," Honan said. "We just have a great atmosphere at The Draft Room for watching games, whether it's Bills games or Sabres games. We've get more than 30 TVs, 24 beers on tap, and we're constantly changing. So I think that's what we're most excited about is that people are eager to see this team do well, and I think we'll have fans that aren't just going to the game, but fans who just want to watch the Sabres play well and watch them on TV."
